Zwingli in his Sixty-seven Theses maintains that the norm for faith is Scripture, and not tradition. The sixty-seven theses were composed in preparation for the first public disputation in Zurich, in which Zwingli defended his position against that of the church tradition, represented by Johann Faber, representative of the bishop. The Council of Zurich had declared that the basis of judgment for the dispute would be the Scriptures, thus giving Zwingli an advantage (Lindberg 170). Zwingli was therefore able to argue that Scripture is a priori the sole foundation of ecclesiastical practice and theology, and his subsequent arguments in the Sixty-Seven Theses followed from that foundation. The plague was a source of great anxiety for Christians starting in the 14th century. and, although it had weakened by the time of the Reformations, it still represented a danger. The high mortality rate of the plague caused the church to react in such a way that it served the dead more than the living (Lindberg 29). The Church moved from emphasis on works of mercy to emphasis on m...